This is the Zorro picture you have when you're not having a Zorro picture. How come? It's written by Johnston McCulley, so the setting of Spanish California is the same for a start. It's also an impersonation picture which re-uses Mr McCulley's favorite plot device -- unfortunately sans disguise, so we always know who the good guy is and who the bad guy is right from the start. The casting also helps squash any illusions that the plot may hold a few surprises. Clean-cut Johnnie Walker is obviously the good guy, black-visaged Eddie Gribbon obviously the bad. But so far, so good. The real disappointment of the movie is Shannon Day. If this frump is 26, she should sue the director, the photographer, the costumer and her make-up man. She looks so plain awful -- or so awful plain -- she makes a plot that was rather shaky to begin with, seem like absolute nonsense. Director William K. Howard does his best to rescue the movie -- and succeeds some of the time!
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JohnHowardReid29 March 2013
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boblipton16 July 2018In Old California, two mysterious strangers, each with papers identifying himself as an anonymous agent of the governor, show up at a Presidio. They are Johnnie Walker and Francis MacDonald. Each claims to be seeking to capture Captain Fly-by-Night, a mysterious road agent who has wound up as the head of a conspiracy of peons and Indians to take over Mexico. Meanwhile, lovely senorita Shannon Day is affianced to a man she has never seen.
Given Douglas Fairbanks' great success in ZORRO, everyone wanted to get into the act, and Robertson-Cole, which specialized in B westerns and cheap melodramas thought this Johnston McCulley story was the property for it to do so, and Walker the star to do it with. He had had a great success with OVER THE HILL at Fox a couple of years earlier, but had a hard time maintaining his standing with the majors, despite obvious talent. He would end his silent career at Columbia, working with Frank Capra as studio and director struggled to work their way into respectability; then Walker would disappear into bit roles in the sound era.
There are some fine stunts here, and a nicely shot sword fight in a bell tower, but despite the usual bravura framing shots by director William K. Howard and cinematographer Lucien Andriot, everyone knew they were filming a western with some swordplay.